Lapisardi, Frederick S.

Dr. Frederick S. Lapisardi is Professor Emeritus of English at California University of Pennsylvania and Executive Director of 64 Crayons Cultural Center. He earned his Ph.D. from New York University. Dr. Lapisardi’s articles have appeared in such journals as Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, The European Legacy, Modern Drama, Eire-Ireland, and The Eugene O’Neill Review. He is the author of The Collected Plays of Eva Gore-Booth (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991).

2006 0-7734-5570-1An avant garde playwright whose theories of stagecraft evolved through performance experience, W.B. Yeats left a complex body of dramatic materials. This book establishes dramaturgical criteria, based on the playwright’s own words, by which all productions of his plays might be judged. Then, through an analysis of Yeats’s plays in performance, it suggests how new stage productions might best engage audiences without violating either texts or theories. Based on fifty years of study and publication about Yeats’s stagecraft and on direct experience with the plays in production both in America and in Ireland, this study develops dramaturgical plans for new productions and shares with readers behind-the-scenes notes from the author’s American Yeats production and from the first three years of James W. Flannery’s International W.B. Yeats Theatre Festival at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Its basic premise turns on the belief that with new technology and with directors who accept the text as living theatre worthy of imaginative stage productions for a more general audience, rather than period pieces intended for an elite few, Yeats could finally emerge as a dramatist on a scale with Beckett, Strindberg, O’Neill and other major innovators of the modern stage.

1991 0-7734-9912-1Eva Gore-Booth, active feminist and pacifist, and sister of the Irish rebel leader Constance Markievicz, published at least nineteen volumes of poems, plays, and prose during her lifetime. Included under this title are all five of Gore-Booth's plays; well-wrought, actable dramas drawing at times on the same materials Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, and AE molded into Ireland's literary renaissance. Supplemented by introductions, a bibliography, and appendices including relevant notes from the 1929 Poems, materials from a rare 1916 edited version of a longer play, and a chronology.